Recipients

Anya is an art historian specialising in nineteenth-century British visual culture. She completed her PhD in Art History at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland in 2023, and her thesis, which investigated the cultural legacy of Victorian British art in Aotearoa New Zealand’s major public collections, was placed on the Dean’s List. Her research uncovered how Victorian paintings’ rich and multifaceted collection histories mirror and enliven the wider narratives of Aotearoa New Zealand’s search for and expression of its own evolving identities. Anya’s History Innovation Fund project explores intersections between ideas of ancient Egypt and constructions of history and identity in Aotearoa New Zealand through reception studies, cultural history, and art history. Her research analyses references to ancient Egypt in New Zealand soldiers’ written accounts and through artworks created during the First World War to understand how these ideas engage with elements of Imperial unity, orientalist narratives, and the layered and complex landscape of nationhood.

Her broader research interests focus on connections between Aotearoa New Zealand, Great Britain, and the Empire through aspects of visual and material culture, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to understand how notions of identity, culture, and heritage are formed and continue to evolve.

Sucharita Sen is interested in the politics of everyday lives beyond the conventional epicentres of power, with her research methodologically anchored at the intersection of History and Political Anthropology. She completed her PhD in 2022 from Victoria University of Wellington under the supervision of Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Kate Hunter. Sucharita examined, within the frameworks of affect theory and the critiques of Orientalism, a world of intimate power vis-à-vis official animosities in British India. She is a recipient of the Walter L. Arnstein Prize for the Best PhD Paper at the 68th Annual Midwest Conference on British Studies (a regional affiliate of the North American Conference on British Studies), 2021, the Prize for the Best PhD Paper at the 2021 Biennial Conference of the New Zealand Historical Association, and a Certificate of Excellence from Oxford University Press (India) for being the winning contributor of the December (2021) issue of Tell Me Your Story Review. Her works have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Society and Culture in South Asia and Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. As the 2023 Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Auckland, Sucharita is working on her first monograph. The monograph revises her PhD thesis, brings in additional materials and rewrites the already published materials afresh.

Sucharita is also working on her next project that investigates the intersection of caste and gender in everyday lives in West Bengal. During her term as a postdoctoral fellow, Sucharita convened a fully-funded international conference that shared her research interests and advanced the Faculty of Arts’ strategic partnerships. She is currently co-editing two post-conference volumes (Volume 1 with Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, and Volume 2 with Felicity Barnes and Omar Mohamed). She is also guest-editing the December 2025 (special) issue of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies.  

Violeta completed her PhD research under the supervision of Professor Mark Seymour and Associate Professor Angela Wanhalla at the University of Otago in 2019. An inaugural recipient of the Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2021, she has secured a publishing contract with Auckland University Press. Her manuscript, He Aroha Hou: Modern Love and Marriage in Aotearoa New Zealand, follows the romantic relationships of diverse men and women from courtship and engagement to marriage and parenthood, concluding in the premature partings and expected ends seen in divorce and death. Drawing on seldom-seen archives of married love, reminiscences of their making, records of their timely and untimely conclusions, her project joins the intimate lives of everyday New Zealanders to cultural and economic shifts prompted by war, urbanisation, sexual liberation, cultural renaissance, and women’s liberation.

Matthew specialises in British imperial history, with a particular interest in colonial Australia and New Zealand. His first article, “History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonisation in South Australia and New Zealand,” Journal of Global History, 16 (2021), won the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize for best scholarly article based upon original research. He is using the History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on two projects that situate New Zealand history in global context.

The first is a monograph that explores how company colonisation drove settler colonial expansion after 1815. Tentatively entitled Empire, Inc. How Company Colonisation Transformed the Settler World, the book would be the first historical account to put forward a Pacific-oriented history of chartered enterprise.

He is also working on a critical edition of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney (1829). Written in Newgate prison, where Wakefield was serving a three-year sentence for abducting a young heiress, A Letter caused a sensation when it was first published. It inspired the foundation of new colonies, and it was debated by intellectual luminaries such as J.S. Mill and Karl Marx. It could not be ignored. The volume aims to place this most enigmatic of texts in world-historical context.

Matthew completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2021.

Sasha completed her DPhil in History at the University of Oxford in 2021, under the supervision of Associate Professors Julia Mannherz and Christina de Bellaigue. Her thesis – Feminine Feelings: Women and Sensation in Paris and St Petersburg, 1900-1910 – explores the sensory landscape of women’s daily lives, illuminating how femininity was constructed as embodied practice and connecting individual somatic experience to wider social and cultural trends. Her first article, ‘Musicians, Students, Listeners: Women and the Conservatoire in pre-war Paris and St Petersburg’ appeared in Social and Cultural History in 2021. More broadly, her research interests encompass urban history, intimacy, histories of sexuality and the body, music, and dance. As a 2022 Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Research Fellow, she is working on two main projects: adapting her thesis for publication as a monograph, and conducting preliminary research for a new project on relationships between women in Russia and the Baltic during the revolutionary period.  

Branka completed her PhD at Monash University in March 2020 under the supervision of Paula Michaels and Michael Hau. Nominated for the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal, Branka’s dissertation analysed reproduction, contraception, and abortion in socialist Yugoslavia, 1945-90. Her research revealed that reproductive regulation played a key role in Yugoslav state formation in the second half of the twentieth century. Her manuscript The ‘New Yugoslav Woman’: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia is in development for publication by Indiana University Press. Branka’s work as a 2022 Barnes-Whitehead History Innovation Fund Postdoctoral Writing Fellow examines the history of menopause and medical and naturopathic treatment of menopausal symptoms in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1970-2000. Branka is also a research fellow at the Liggins Institute at the University of Auckland where she is researching and co-authoring a book on the history of the Auckland Antenatal Steroid Trial (1969-1974) and the development of fetal medicine in New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century. Her research interests include histories of gender and sexuality, and particularly how they intersect with histories of medicine, science, and technology. She is also inspired by popular media, art, and exhibitions, as well as oral history in her research and writing.